Testing front-of-package warnings to discourage red meat consumption: a randomized experiment with US meat consumers

Abstract

Background Reducing red meat is a strategy to improve public health and mitigate climate change in the United States and other high-income countries. Policies requiring warnings on the front of red meat packages are a promising intervention to shift consumers towards healthier and more sustainable food choices. We aimed to explore participants’ reactions to health and environmental warning messages about red meat. Methods Between June and July 2020, we recruited a national convenience sample of US red meat consumers (n = 1,235; mean age 44 years) for an online survey. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four label conditions: no-label control, health warning, environment warning, and combined health and environment warning (both warnings shown side-by-side). Participants viewed three types of burritos (red meat [steak], chicken, and vegetarian) and selected their preferred item (primary outcome), the item they perceived to be most damaging to health, and the item they perceived to be most damaging to the environment (secondary outcomes). Participants then viewed their assigned warning on a series of other red meat products (no-label control participants were randomly re-assigned to one of the warning conditions) and rated the warnings on perceived message effectiveness, believability, negative emotions, perceived risk, attention, and learning something new. Finally, participants reported their intentions to reduce red meat consumption. Results There were no significant differences in selection of the steak burrito between label conditions or in selection of the item most damaging to the environment. Those exposed to the health warning were more likely to select the steak burrito as most damaging to health compared to those exposed to other label conditions (health 73 %, combined 64 %, environment 60 %, no-label control 63 %, p < 0.05). The combined and health warnings elicited higher perceived message effectiveness ratings than the environment warning (combined mean 2.91, health 2.84, environment 2.61, p < 0.05). Conclusions Warnings did not have a significant effect on item preference in the choice experiment. However, combined and health warnings performed better than the environment warning across a variety of warning label reaction measures. More research will be needed to understand whether warnings elicit behavioral change in real-world environments. Trial registration Analyses and hypotheses were preregistered on https://aspredicted.org/ph7mb.pdf on 23 June 2020.

Designing Environmental Messages to Discourage Red Meat Consumption: An Online Experiment

“…The primary objective of this research is to explore the efficacy of goal framing for discouraging red meat purchases by experimentally testing whether messages that convey the worsening of environmental harms or the reduction of environmental harms are perceived as more effective at discouraging beef purchases. Perceived message effectiveness is a predictor of longer-term behavior change [ 63 ] and is a widely-used measure in initial testing of messages because it tends to be sensitive to small differences between similar messages [ 64 , 65 , 66 , 67 , 68 ]. Given the paucity of research on goal framing for messages focused on discouraging red meat consumption, this was an exploratory study and as such, we did not have an a priori hypothesis about which type of message would elicit higher effectiveness.…”

Developing health and environmental warning messages about red meat: An online experiment

“…Although perceived effectiveness is a marker for messages' potential to change behavior, more research is needed to assess whether red meat warnings influence red meat purchasing and consumption behaviors. To our knowledge, only one study has investigated the impact of health and environmental warnings on outcomes related to red meat purchases [27]. That study found that participants perceived health warnings and combined environmental and health warnings as more effective than environmental warnings.…”

“…Given that previous research has shown that perceived message effectiveness is predictive of behavioral change [35], it is unclear why even the health warnings did not reduce selection of red meat in that study. One possibility is that the behavioral task may not have been properly powered to detect differences [27], or that the simplistic nature of an online choice experiment does not reflect how warnings would influence purchasing decisions in the real world. Future research would be useful to understand whether such warnings would discourage meat purchases in a more realistic food retail environment.…”

“…Specifically, limited research has compared health and environmental warning messages side by side or identified the most promising health and environmental harms to include in warning messages. We recently published a study comparing two specific health warnings (about cancer and early death) and two specific environmental warnings (about environmental damage and carbon emissions) [27]; here, we describe the exploratory research that led to the development of the specific warnings used in that study.…”

“…We further aimed to assess potential differences in message reactions across demographic groups. Our primary outcome was perceived message effectiveness (PME), a measure that has been used extensively in similar experiments to identify the potential impact of food and beverage warning labels on consumers [27,[30][31][32][33][34]. PME is a measure that is sensitive enough to detect small differences between warnings yet is also predictive as to messages' ability to change actual behaviors [35].…”